ABSTRACT
American photographer Matthew Brady used the daguerreotype process early in his career to create studio portraits. Over time, he adopted the newer, faster photographic processes being developed in the United Kingdom, with which photographers “fi xed” positive images onto glass or metal plates. By the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), Brady was making large negatives on plates; the negatives could yield multiple identical prints (on paper treated with albumen or salt). Of key importance to archival fi lmmakers, however, was Brady’s decision to hire a group of photographers to join him in taking the equipment
out of the studio and onto battlefi elds. Brady collected his employees’ negatives and also bought negatives from other photographers present, publishing these images under his own name. (The collection, in the U.S. Library of Congress, offers an early example of archival manipulation: Historians determined that a Brady photographer had repeatedly moved and posed the body of a Confederate sniper.)
Wire Services In the 1830s, inventors in the United Kingdom patented the fi rst commercial electrical telegraph, a device for transmitting text over long distances. Independently but simultaneously, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse also patented an electrical telegraph, and by the 1840s he had convinced the U.S. Congress to wire the nation. The organization that became the Associated Press was formed in 1846, and by the time of the Civil War, AP reporters were using the telegraph to communicate in real time with their home newspapers. By the 20th century, telegraph wires spanned the globe and wireless technology (the radio) was gaining in popularity.
